


Imago Dei

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Trueform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 17:27:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Trueform!Cas, future!fic (ish)) A drabble, heavily influenced by the Lightborn Project.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imago Dei

****

He’s a thousand faces, a thousand wings, rustling and shifting and whispering; a monster, Dean supposes, technically, but he feels only peace, only relief, only the soft throb of laughter as it builds in his throat and he walks, sure, towards the hulking creature that on earth was his best friend.

“This was you? All this time?” He says along an exhale.

Cas – because it is him, irrevocably, even though his eyes are pupil-less, his arms the size of steel girders, wiry and muscled and ending in three-pronged hands with thick, trunk-like fingers. The angel squirms almost bashfully under his gaze.

“I missed you, Dean.” He rumbles. Dean smiles gently and stands beneath him, the head above him like a huge pendulum, hanging from a long neck with a ridge along its base like the edge of a spine. Along the neck hang the faces and heads of a thousand animals, a thousand races, creatures mythical and real, both. At the front his ‘main’ head is a smooth, almost featureless oval, but for the large blue – entirely blue – eyes. His back is sloped and bent forward to look at Dean, set back on huge, muscled haunches, folded beneath his body. He is, as Dean always suspected, genderless; his torso is shaped like neither man nor woman’s, is basically a huge ribcage with Castiel’s bluish flesh stretched over it, covered in feather-like scales at his elbows, hips and knees. Between his legs is nothing; he simply  _ends_ , his groin smooth and flat like the rest of him, and Dean tries desperately not to stare.

The head at the front of Castiel’s long body leans towards him. He says, voice loud as thunder and yet pressed to the whorl of Dean’s ear; “I hope you’re not too alarmed by my appearance. I wanted to be the first to receive you when you arrived.”

Dean looks into his huge, round eyes, and can’t stop himself from smiling. He reaches a hand up to touch Castiel’s cheek. “Nah. This is-“ He laughs softly. “Alright, maybe I’m a  _little_ ‘alarmed’.” He admits, and the smile in Castiel’s eyes – for he has no mouth, on this face at least – does not dim.

On earth, Dean lived ten years with the angel, and forty without him. He left and there was an understanding; a sense of inevitability, though Dean raged and fought him, and Castiel, frustrated, fought him back. One morning he was there and then he was not, and for the rest of his years on earth, Dean had no choice but to cope with it; to try to find a love that would replace the love of an angel (a task which he realised, after a while, was pretty much destined to fail). He had love, though. In his nieces and nephews, in Sam and his family, in the small, snatched pieces of intimacy he dug for himself along the way.

His life continued on as it had before; with a large hole in it of indefinable shape, which could not be filled, but nor did it hurt. Often.

Now, though, after everything, he feels no more whole, just – different.

Underneath his hand, Castiel’s skin is warm. He trails a hand over the rise of the smooth, bluish cheek, marvelling at how it feels like flesh, like marble, like – like _Cas,_ as he never knew him, as he never touched him on earth.

Their relationship in the aftermath of the apocalypse, before Castiel returned, was rushed and frantic, a press of bodies in the dark, a snatched kiss, a mess of sweat and anger and lust. He feels guilty, now, for treating him like any other being – for not knowing he was  _this,_ huge and powerful and strange and  _beautiful,_ rising above him, almost architectural.

“This was you? Always?”

Castiel ducks his head, pressing his cheek harder into Dean’s palm. “This is an approximation. My form …is malleable. It shifts.”

“Guess you felt pretty cramped, holed up in Jimmy all the time, huh.” Dean murmurs, trailing a hand from Castiel’s face as he talks and drawing it down to his neck; running it over the ridge on the underside, noting the change in texture, the way his skin grows feather-like, almost furred, warm when Dean touches him but cold before, like his hand is heating him up. Some of the heads follow the path of his hand, watching; their sightless eyes are white, milky, but trace his movements nonetheless. The heads not watching his hand are fixed on his face. Dean balks underneath their scrutiny, and his hand reaches Castiel’s chest; the angel bends to accommodate him, to let him touch where his neck joins his body, where the countless wings sprout.

“It was uncomfortable at first.” Castiel admits. Dean reaches the wings, their long feathers trailing along Castiel’s back – some unfurled, some close to his skin, some stretching towards Dean like a million hands, their want almost palpable in the air. He reaches a hand out to touch one, and hears Castiel mutter as if he was pressed to his back, “Be careful.”

His hand stretches out nonetheless, tentative, and he gently grazes the surface of one of his wings with a hand. The feathers move constantly, shifting and undulating; they move like wind through blades of grass, changing dark to light, iridescent as he watches. The wings extend so high that Dean can’t see where they finish, even with his head tipped right back.

“This is so fucking cool.” He says against the wing, and Castiel’s laughter is huge, booming, loud, but still like how it was on earth; a ripple, a stirring, a tremble that began in his throat and waved quickly across his body.

He walks back to where Castiel’s head is, to where his eyes are, and Castiel has been waiting the entire time, patient. “It’s weird.” He says to Castiel, touching carefully the wide expanse of his face, fingertips brushing the crinkles at his eyes. “You look like  _you._ I never even imagined you like this, I never knew, but you’re still…  _you.”_

“I was worried you might not know me.” Castiel tells him, unsure.

“How could I not?” Dean breathes, voice full of wonder. He falls silent, eyes close to Castiel’s skin; writ on his flesh are runes, sigils, symbols in Enochian, in Arabic, in Chinese; numerals and spells, things Dean doesn’t even recognise, soft and pulsing, golden, tiny, against the span of him. He meets Castiel’s colossal gaze again, raising his head. “How could you love me?” He asks, the question burning in him not only for the last few moments – not only since Dean first saw this Castiel – but since those hands raised him from hell, since they met in the Pit and he was Saved.

At that, Castiel laughs again, his eyes frank, soft, only barely mocking. Dean blinks, hears the barest rustling, and then Castiel is before him as he knew him, as the man with a galaxy of knowledge and love behind his eyes, and bedhead so ridiculous Dean was sure he spent mornings doing it on purpose.

Castiel steps forward, arms outstretched, and wraps them around him, holds him close for the first time in what feels like eons, like  _ages_. He kisses him and his mouth is warm; he pulls back, hands on Dean’s waist. Small again, but Dean can’t see him that way anymore; can almost  _feel_ the weight of him, even now.

“How could I not?”


End file.
